


Cold Comfort

by bendingwind



Category: Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M, PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-25
Updated: 2012-12-25
Packaged: 2017-11-22 10:13:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 916
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/608693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bendingwind/pseuds/bendingwind
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's no hard and fast line between Steve's dreams and his reality.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cold Comfort

**Author's Note:**

  * For [leiascully](https://archiveofourown.org/users/leiascully/gifts).



1.

Sometimes he dreamed that he couldn’t breathe, that he gasped and he gasped and there still wasn’t enough air and his mother was crying--but, then, his mother had been the one fighting to breathe in the end, every gasp as much a struggle as he had ever endured, and she--she didn’t keep breathing, though he held her hand and cried for her as she had often cried for him.

Sometimes he dreamed of fire and blood and the bone-deep booms of bombs falling. He knew they were dreams because even in his sleep he registered the discord between the death and danger of his mind and the warm safety of his cot.

Sometimes he dreamed of falling, and he wasn’t himself but his best friend, plummeting toward an icy river and knowing that, this time, no one was going to catch him. Or he was himself, and he was never going to make that date, just one more time he failed to catch someone he loved.

First his arms were too frail and then his heart wasn’t strong enough and now--now he didn’t have anyone to save.

And, only very rarely, he lost himself in the nightmares. He would wake up, paralyzed and dirty and covered in blood in the helicarrier, and the next morning he would find Agent Barton or Agent Romanov or one of the others from the handful of agents they’d introduced him too. They would spar until his partner gave up, and then he would destroy too many punching bags or tear up the obstacle course. He liked sparring with Agent Romanov best, because they could both keep going until the lights would go off and the training rooms closed for the night. Usually, she treated him to dinner in the SHIELD cafeteria after--only she said no one ever charged for his food so really she was just getting them admitted--and he went home feeling a little calmer, a little safer, a little more grounded in reality.

2.

He doesn’t dream of the ice. He doesn’t remember freezing or waiting at all; one moment he was falling, and then he was somewhere warm and soft with the wrong baseball game playing on the wireless.

Sometimes he still thinks that it might all be a dream, that he’ll wake up no taller than a bit with scrawny limbs and failing lungs, and wonder what he drank at Stark Expo to give him such a hangover. 

Sometimes he holds his breath for too long, waiting for his instincts to kick him awake and jolt him out of his dreams. Sometimes he wants to pinch himself, but doesn’t; someone would ask what was wrong, and he doesn’t know how to explain. 

Some days it almost feels like the war never ended, like he’s just on leave while his commandos run a mission that doesn’t require Captain America, or maybe like way back before they shipped him to the front, like he’s just backstage between shows, killing time.

Some days he dreams of life before the war, of lungs that struggled for each breath, of arms too frail to help anyone, of helplessness and hopelessness and frustration.

And when he wakes up in the helicarrier, posed for flight, Natasha will lean over and nudge him and offer a quiet, “Hey.”

She looks at him with a question in her eyes that he isn’t really ready to answer, and he shakes his head, and she nods and goes to distract Stark so that Steve has enough time to gather himself. He’s grateful for those quiet moments, where he reorients himself to the world as it is. He appreciates that she helps facilitate them and sometimes, as he comes out of it, he wonders what has happened in her life to make her understand so well.

But other times, as he lies still at night in his too-soft bed and closes his eyes, he expects not to fall asleep, but to wake up.

3\. 

One day, when she asks, he will be ready to answer the questions in her eyes. He will tell her what he dreams of, of blood and fire and falling, and worse than all of that, the dreams of rare happy memories that leave him to wake and face his failure. He will tell her that sometimes he’s not sure he woke up at all, and that this is hell: and she will reach up and cup his jaw in her small, deadly hand and speak to him, first in Russian, and then in English. She will tell him of her dreams of being frozen, of being thawed when she was needed and frozen and thawed and frozen again. She will tell him about the nightmares of waking, and still being frozen. She will tell him that in her darker hours, she fears that these dreams are memories, and that she is terrified of the things that she might have forgotten.

She will say: _That’s how I know that I’m still alive, still human, no matter what was done to me or what I choose to become._

He will ask her why it matters and she will smile and pull him down into a soft, chaste kiss. He will blush and stammer out something nonsensical and she will interrupt--

 _Come and find me when you figure it out,_ she will say, and she will walk away from him then.

Someday, he will take her up on that offer.


End file.
